2 posts tagged “book reviews”

I like mysteries and tales of intrigue and espionage, so I picked up a paperback copy of The Machiavelli Covenant.  I mean, heck, Machiavelli was certainly an intriguing character and covenants are all mysterious and stuff, right? Wrong. In the interest of saving my fellow readers a few shekels I feel compelled to share my opinion that this was one of the most poorly written and edited books I have ever read.  I really don't even know what the story is about because I

couldn't get past the editing blunders and juvenile literary devices--which I found to be extremely intrusive--enough to get get a sense of the plot.  The whole premise of "show, don't tell," the absolute hallmark of good fiction writing that is drilled into the head of every first-year English major, is totally absent in The Machiavelli Covenant.  There's a whole lotta tellin' and very little showin' going on. I finally got so frustrated with the writing style I resorted to making vaguely threatening marginal notations like, "If the narrator parenthetically tells me one more time how something is pronounced I'm going tear this chapter out," etc., etc.  The only other time I can remember being so enraged by the lousy quality of a "best seller" is back when the "Celestine Prophesy" came out to much fanfare many years ago.  It was immediately clear to me why the author had to initially self-publish his ridiculous compilation of mystical baloney and I remember thinking "If the narrator says he was 'awestruck' one more time, I'm going to throw this book against the wall.  Lo and behold, he was 'awestruck' in the very next paragraph and I ended up with a hole in my wall.

It's possible that The Machiavelli Covenant is an engaging story if you can get past the bad editing, although I don't really see how.  The characters seem to have stepped out of a D-list soap opera--lots of drama and allusions to mysterious pasts, but no true depth or development.  Another pet peeve of mine is condescending authors who don't trust their readers to work out subtle allusions to features of character and instead blast them with a two-by-four so as to leave no doubt about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Sheesh. Even Ian Fleming managed to endow his cartoon villains with some recognizably human traits. Folsom's bad guys might just as well have had stickers on their foreheads that read "Mr. Sinister," "Captain Conspiracy," and so on. I found it hard to care about what happened to any of his characters and since for me characters are the story, I found it hard to care at all about the story. 

Must admit, in an effort to spare my walls from any untoward book- throwing violence, I did not finish this book, so it could be that the last half was remarkably better than the first.  If this is the case, my sincere apologies to Mr. Folsom, Mr. Sinister, Captain Conspiracy and all of their fans. 

I have struggled to reconcile the Neocon's supposed roots in post-World War II intellectualism.  It's not that they are an uneducated bunch, but their arguments, based as they are almost entirely on ideology, would seem to run counter to the great traditions of intellectualism: Debate, reasoning, moderating of positions in the face of new evidence, etc.  When nothing--not even overwhelming evidence that your positions are wrong--can dissuade you from defending them for the sake of ideology, you have lost your right to claim to be an intellectual.

The strength of this attachment to ideal over reality is extremely childlike and I have frequently thought some of the leading Neocon's of the day (Kristol, Wolfowitz, Perle, etc) act more like petulant, spoiled children, than responsible adults focused on the public good.  In the New York Times, Timothy Noah reviews a new book by Jacob Heilbrunn that highlights this strange quirk of Neocon behavior. Heilbrunn, a "reformed" Neocon, looks at the history of the movement, the rigid ideology that informs their foreign policy recommendations while almost entirely dismissing domestic policy issues (this he attributes to the fact that the majority of adherents are Jewish, as he is, and they are inordinately focused on the State of Israel to the exclusion of other geopolitical issues) and their resistance to accepting reality when it conflicts with their preconceived ideals.  From the NYT Book Review, "Heilbrunn nicely compares the Soviet Union’s imminent collapse to “a Christmas present handed to a grumpy child who was not in the mood to accept it.” After decades of proselytizing about the uselessness of diplomacy, they were unwilling to accept that diplomacy was, in fact, important in toppling Communism.  This is a cautionary tale for us today when the leading lights of the Neocon movement are on record discouraging the use of diplomacy as a valid strategic tactic to use in the Middle East. 

I have not read the book yet, but plan to, if nothing else, to answer the burning question "how can so many smart people be so stupid?"  The case of the Neocons (broad brush, here--I'm sure there are degrees of "Neocon-ness")  appears to demonstrate the limitations of education when faced with unreasonableness.  It is just too bad they have their academic credentials to fall back on--false bona fides that make up for questionable reasoning ability and disguise the actual elitist brutality of their cause.